


Word Association

by Cadhla



Category: Cupid (TV 1998)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-29
Updated: 2015-12-29
Packaged: 2018-05-10 02:27:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5565721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cadhla/pseuds/Cadhla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Psychological exercises lead to a little too much information, and then contemplation, and no one goes home happy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Word Association

"Word association."

"Must we? I was hoping for a higher class of psychological aggravation today. Ink blots. Maybe those little books of pictures where I have to make up a story about the charming lives of the happy little families that they portray. Hypnotism. Something we didn't do three days ago."

Claire put her pencil down, and glared at him. "Somehow, when we do anything 'high class', you manage to make it about sex. I was hoping to avoid that today."

"Oh, it's not just the higher class exercises, honest." Trevor offered his brightest, most winning smile. "I can make anything about sex. Even the Muppets, although that was a bar bet, and so I'm not entirely sure it counts."

"Word. Association."

Trevor sighed, leaning back on the couch with his fingers laced behind his head. "If you insist."

"Thank you. I do." Claire paused a moment, creating the illusion of distance between the conversation and the exercise. "Red."

"Meat."

"White."

"Tie."

"Boy."

"Meets girl, preferably in a nice French restaurant somewhere near the water, they have a few drinks, a few laughs, he asks her if she's seeing anyone, she lets her shawl drift a few inches off her shoulders, 'accidentally', says that she's available--"

" _Trevor_."

"What?"

Claire sighed. "Just...try to stay on task, please?"

"Spoilsport." He wiggled his shoulders, settling more firmly into the couch. "All right, _master_. I'm ready when you are."

"Fine." A pause. "Home."

"Am I supposed to be associating with 'fine' or 'home'?"

"Trevor..."

"All right, all right. Home..." He paused, then replied, "Olympus."

"Love."

"Duty."

"Hate."

"Duty."

Claire made a note. "Father."

"Arrogant, self-serving bastard who thinks it's _easy_ to make mortals fall in love, even though everything about them is programmed to reject what's good and true and built to last in favor of plastic crap that falls apart inside a month but who cares, there's always more to come." Trevor shoved himself off the couch, starting to pace, making wild gestures with his hands. "No one wants romance anymore. No one wants champagne and roses and mistaken identities and midnight serenades. It's all sex, sex, sex, and that's a great way to spend a Friday night, but it's no foundation for a healthy work environment!"

"Trevor--"

"And yet there he sits, Lord of the Cosmos, Mister High-and-Mighty, passing down proclamations. Like _he's_ done anything in the customer service field in the last seven thousand years? Newsflash, Dad, the modern woman doesn't put out for a giant swan!"

"Trevor--"

"And Mom? Mom is about as much help as a backup dancer at a Madonna concert! Where's the defense when I need it, huh, Mom? Where's the maternal love? 'Send him to Earth for a few years, he'll learn humility.' Since when is _that_ a divine trait? My parents wouldn't know humility if it bit them on the--"

" _Trevor_!"

He skidded to a stop, twisting around to look at her. "Oh. Hi, Claire."

"Hi," she said briskly, putting her pencil down on top of the clipboard and offering him her brightest, thinnest smile. "Should we try to do this another time, when you're not so emotional about the subject?"

"What? Oh. Yeah, that'd be great. Thanks. Catch you later, gotta fly." Grabbing his coat off the back of the couch, Trevor raked a hand through his hair, and jetted for the door.

Claire twisted around, protesting, "I was..." The slam of the door cut her off. She sighed, picking up her pencil and dropping it back to the clipboard as she dropped back into her original position. "...kidding," she finished, wryly.

*

Home.

The goal of every quest, every grand adventure, every advance in human achievement, every act of worship, it's all been the same: it's all just men looking for the way to go home, even when they weren't exactly certain where that was. Love, real love, _true_ love, was just a way of cutting out the physical middle man, because someone who's in love--really in love--can be at home no matter where they are, as long as the person they love is there. People fell in love because they couldn't afford the cost of housing, while heroes went on glorious journeys and slaughtered dragons, just for the right to claim a place to lay their heads. "God of love" might as well have been "allegorical real estate broker"; the titles meant the same thing.

Trevor Hale, erstwhile God of love, walked up the stairs to his apartment with his hands jammed into his pockets and his head bowed, and wondered if he was ever going home again.

The door was locked. He unlocked it--what a tiny, mundane thing, and what a perfect illustration of how far he'd fallen; since when did love need a key? Since when could a little lock keep love outside?--and swung it open, calling as he did, "Hey, Lucy, I'm..." There was no one there. "...home," he finished, and closed the door behind himself, turning the deadbolt to the locked position, and shutting the world outside.

Hadn't that always been his crime? From the beginning, hadn't that been the problem? God of love, master of human affections, celestial cruise director, and what did he do with himself? He shut himself in and the world out, he left the world to wither for the lack of love, to wallow in the idea of love, and to suffer with no realities at all. He had better things to do than serve a purpose he never asked to be created for. Even if he was good at it. Even if he took a certain satisfaction in playing out boy-meets-girl--or, back in Greece, in a less enlightened but somewhat more loose-laced time, boy-meets-boy, girl-meets-girl, boy-meets-harem, and Circe-meets-barnyard-animals--to its eventual, inevitable conclusion. There was always something better to do than wander through the world shooting people with invisible arrows and playing Doctor Ruth to a world full of gibbering apes who couldn't manage it on their own.

Maybe he got a little too insulated. Maybe he got a little too wrapped up in doing his own thing, and forgot about taking care of business. Maybe. But given that you couldn't exactly call most of the Olympian gods "employee of the month" types these days--when was the last time Amphitrite even got out of bed, much less administered a hurricane? And Posideon? They barely even got him out of Sea World without a court order--why was he the one being singled out for this sort of grief? It wasn't right. It wasn't fair.

Too bad "fair" had never really been a consideration for the divine.

There was probably beer in the fridge. It was Thursday; there was almost always beer in the fridge on Thursdays. Thursday could practically be called "Beerday" and still have a good shot at being accurate. Not that accuracy had ever been a factor in the naming of days before. "It's not like Thor comes over once a week and changes all the lightbulbs," Trevor muttered, levering himself out of the chair and heading for the kitchen.

Mortals didn't invent alcohol, and a cold beer in an empty apartment had nothing on one of Baccus's mixers, but Trevor was learning to be adaptable.

Not like he had much of a choice.

*

Home.

Claire unlocked the door and clicked on the light, dropping her purse and keys to the end table without thinking about it. Patterns were the key. Set up enough of those, lock them together tightly enough, and you'd never have to worry about what you were doing with yourself--not for a few minutes, anyway, and sometimes, a few minutes of peace and quiet was all you got to ask for in life. Someone would be pounding on her door to howl about how the walls of their world were caving in soon enough. One nice thing about a career in psychiatric work: she never had to worry about things staying dull for very long. Even when they tried, someone else inevitably came along with some nice new form of total breakdown for her to struggle to repair.

Take, for example, "Trevor Hale," bane of her Thursday afternoons. And, if she was being honest, her Fridays, Saturdays, and any other days he wanted to interpose himself upon. She'd always had a tendency to get overly involved with her patients--depending on your definition of "overly," that was; she privately thought that most psychiatrists held themselves a bit too aloof, which endangered the healing process--but she'd never had one of them just decide to do as he pleased with her, and damn the consequences. Trevor wasn't much for consequences, that was for sure.

Not unless those consequences were directly tied to toying with the human heart.

As forms of psychosis go, "I am the God of Love" seemed like a relatively harmless one. Say "I have a patient who thinks he's Cupid," and most people would picture a balding, middle-aged man in an over sized white diaper, carrying a quiver full of arrows tipped with gigantic red construction paper hearts. Something cute, harmless, and Hallmark-esque.

The fact that the reality was closer to a satyr on speed--a _celibate_ satyr on speed, who talked fast enough to give most used car salesmen a run for his money--with an active interest in meddling in the lives of absolutely everyone he came into contact with, well...most people just didn't quite understand that part. "If Trevor's antics were novelized," she'd said to a friend the week before, "they'd be viewed as too high-concept for the common man, and he'd be remaindered inside of the week."

"So you're aiming for what, exactly, with _your_ book?" asked the friend, amusement plain.

Claire had smiled, smugly. "I'm thinking 'cult classic'."

Trevor Hale: the Rocky Horror Picture Show of mental illnesses.

Dealing with him was exhausting, however, no matter how entertaining it might sometimes be. The things that made him most charming were the same things that showed just how broken he really was. Get past the defenses and the delusions, and you'd probably find a very different man--but one who knew he _was_ a man, and not the manifestation of some greater cosmic force.

If she really stopped to think about it, she'd probably miss the Trevor they had now, all madness and motion. But the world is safer for the sane. If curing Trevor meant killing the person he'd become, well...

It was a small price to pay.

Crossing to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of wine before dinner, Claire couldn't stop herself from wondering whether Trevor would see things the same way.

*

There was never a Psyche.

That was the one part that worried him, even a little. Trevor could remember all the details of life on Olympus, from the stench of ozone that always followed Dad after one of his afternoons of target practice in the cloud banks to the time Mom decided to dye her hair red to mimic the changing fashions down on Earth. He remembered field trips to the Elysian Fields, watching Hercules puzzle his way through puberty, and those endless cocktail parties at Baccus's place, where the layered drinks tasted like oblivion and nobody ever drank the water. He remembered it all. His too-brief childhood, his glorious adulthood, his lovers, his enemies, his friends...everything.

Everything but the wife mortal myths now insisted that he'd had. The one they named the practice of healing the mind after. The one he knew, deep down, had never existed at all.

There were a few options. Option the first--and the one that he preferred--said that the mortals got it wrong. They'd done it before, after all. They conflated demigods or forgot them entirely, they changed their names, they changed their positions in the pantheon: no one who'd been there for the shit-fit when Allomai found out that she'd been removed from the human lists due to a clerical error, and replaced with Ocypete, who was too flaky and water-logged to understand why she was suddenly being provided with body guards to protect her from her second cousin, was going to forget about _that_. So they screwed up. Some storyteller decided that Eros needed a wife, and bang, he was a married man, with completely fictional alimony threatening his future.

Option the second was that his father had, for whatever idiotic reason, decided he couldn't go back to Earth remembering that he was married. So wham, the Father of the Gods just reached into his darling boy's skull and wiped out the bits that didn't suit him. Problem was, well...why? If the purpose of this exercise was learning humility, what better way to teach humility than to remind him that every hour he spent on Earth left his wife--who'd have to be an incredible hotty to have convinced him to settle down in the first place--alone with the gentle mercies of Ares, Apollo, and all the other sexual deviants in the old neighborhood. Fictional or not, no woman deserved _that_.

"Except maybe Mom," he muttered, opening another beer. "But that's her job."

Finally, there was option number three, or, as he sometimes thought of it, "Claire's Option." Claire's Option said that he, Trevor Hale, was in fact a grade-A lunatic, suitable only for rehabilitation, incarceration, and being pelted with overripe fruit. He could have electroshock therapy, unveil his traumatized inner child, and eventually get a menial job someplace where he'd never be a danger to himself or others again. He could become a contributing member of society, and forget about Olympus, and the wife he'd never actually had. Sanity was always an option.

Trevor considered this for a long moment before taking a swig from his beer. "I'd rather," he said, "be crazy."

*

Claire considered her notes from the day's session, sipping her wine thoughtfully. The really worrisome part, when she got right down to it, was that she hadn't seen the outburst coming. Oh, "Olympus" for "home" was classic Trevor--that was normal, reassuring, even--but normally, when she said "father," he just clammed right up and refused to talk about it. It was the only shut-down more assured than "Psyche," which was normally the equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb on his Bikini Atoll. Bang, boom, and the session is over.

So why had he gone off today, of all days? And why give so much detail, even if he was just ranting?

And why did he sound so _angry_?

_Possible parental issues_ , she wrote, then hesitated, before underlining it twice.

Sadly, that particular development did nothing to undermine his delusion. According to Bullfinch's books on mythology, there was quite possibly _nothing_ that better described the Greek pantheon than "possible parental issues." Save, perhaps, for "family history of over-dramatic behavior."

"I knew the job was dangerous when I took it," she said, and sighed, and finished her wine in one long gulp.

*

"Word association."

"Must we? We both know that never ends well."

"Yes. We must."

Trevor sighed. "Look, Doc, what if I promise that _this_ week, the happy inkblot families won't reveal any kinks involving correction fluid?"

"What if _I_ promise that this week, we're staying here until you play word association games with me?"

He eyed her. "You wouldn't."

Claire smiled sweetly. "You're my last appointment. There's nothing on TV. Try me."

"Evil, Doc. You're evil."

"Yes. I know. Are we ready?" Trevor grunted noncommittally, and Claire nodded. "All right, then: near."

"Far."

"Up."

"Town."

"Down."

"Town."

Claire glanced up, amused. "City."

"Bright lights, big city. You know, they say the neon lights are bright..."

Some things never change.


End file.
